Your pension could be at the center of America's next financial crisis

I’m not a fan of the “greed is good” mentality of Wall Street investment firms. But the next financial crisis that rocks America won’t be driven by bankers behaving badly. It will in fact be driven by pension funds that cannot pay out what they promised to retirees. According to one pension advocacy organization, nearly 1 million working and retired Americans are covered by pension plans at the risk of collapse.

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The looming pension crisis is not limited by geography or economic focus. These including former public employees, such as members of South Carolina’s government pension plan, which covers roughly 550,000 people — one out of nine state residents — and is a staggering $24.1 billion in the red. These include former blue collar workers such as roughly 100,000 coal miners who face serious cuts in pension payments and health coverage thanks to a nearly $6 billion shortfall in the plan for the United Mine Workers of America. And when the bill comes due, we will all be in very big trouble.

It’s bad enough to consider the philosophical fallout here, with reneging on the promise of a pension and thus causing even more distrust of bankers and retirement planners. But I’m speaking about a cold, numbers-based perspective that causes a drag on many parts of the American economy. Consider the following.

Pensioners have no flexibility

According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report from 2015, the average household income of someone older than age 75 is $34,097 and their average expenses exceed that slightly, at $34,382. It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that even a modest reduction in retirement income makes the typical budget of a 75-year-old unsustainable — even when the average budget is far from luxurious at current levels. This inflexibility is a hard financial reality of someone who is no longer able to work and is reliant on means other than labor to make ends meet.

Social Security is in a tight spot

So who will step up to support these former pensioners? Perhaps the government, via Social Security, except that program itself is in crisis and will see its trust fund go to zero just 17 years from now, in 2034, based on the current structure of the program. If millions of pensions go bust and retirees have no other savings to fall back on, it will be nigh impossible to cut benefits or reduce the drag on this program. But won’t a pension collapse mean we desperately need Social Security, even in an imperfect form, well beyond 2034?

The guaranty is no solution

There is an organization, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which is meant to insure pensions against failure. However, it was created in 1974 as part of a host of financial reforms and is far from a perfect solution, primarily because it is funded by premiums from defined-benefit plan sponsors and assets seized from former plan sponsors that have entered bankruptcy.

What happens when a handful of troubled pension funds turns into dozens or hundreds? Remember, the PBGC guarantees a certain amount that is decidedly lower than your full pension — as members of the Road Carriers 707 pension fund learned when the group “protected” their pensions by helping to pay benefits, which had been reduced from $1,313 per month to $570. That’s better than zero, but hardly encouraging.

This is not about helping Baby Boomers fund an annual cruise to the Caribbean. Older, low-income pensioners are not saving their money. Instead, they’re spending it on necessities such as food, housing, healthcare and transportation. That means every penny you reduce from their budget means a penny in spending that is removed from the U.S. economy.

Anyone who has taken Econ 101 knows about the “multiplier effect” where $1 in extra spending can produce a much larger amount of economic activity as that dollar circulates around businesses, consumers and banks … or in this case, how $1 less in spending causes a an equally powerful cascade of negative consequences.

By helping ward against a pension crisis, America will be protecting its economy for everyone — plain and simple. But that requires some tough decisions on all sides. For instance, the U.S. Treasury denied a cut to New York Teamsters’ pension plan that was proposed last year. But now the fund is on the brink of collapse, and its recipients are facing benefits that are in some cases one-third what they were 15 years ago.

Like Social Security, current workers can’t contribute enough to offset the big obligations owed to retirees. And as with the flagship entitlement program, it’s up to regulators and legislators to step in — even when it may not be easy — in order to keep the system from collapsing. Let’s hope they make both pension reform and Social Security reform a priority in the near future.

Jeff Reeves is a stock analyst and executive editor of InvestorPlace.com. His commentary has also appeared on CNBC, Fox Business, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal network.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.